University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Update: Well maybe not, see ADDENDUM below. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the classroom. For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few. Working conditions tend to be cozy and civilized and there are minimal travel demands, except perhaps a non-mandatory conference or two. As for compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for professors is $62,000, not a huge amount of money but enough to live on, especially in a university town.

Another boon for professors: Universities are expected to add 305,700 adjunct and tenure-track professors by 2020, according to the BLS. All of those attributes land university professor in the number one slot on Careercast.com’s list of the least stressful jobs of 2013. The ranking comes from an annual best and worst jobs list that began in 1995 under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal. In 2009 the Journal dropped the ranking, which then moved over to CareerCast.com, a career and job listing website based in Carlsbad, Calif. The best and worst jobs listing, which ranks 200 jobs according to more than 100 criteria, comes out in April. This is the third year CareerCast has released a list of least and most stressful jobs, derived from its best and worst lists.

To gauge which jobs are the least stressful, CareerCast considered the 200 professions in its database and focused on 11 different job demands that it deemed likely to provoke stress, including travel, growth potential, competitiveness, physical demands, hazards, environmental conditions and risk to one’s own life or to others’.

According to Tony Lee, CareerCast’s publisher, the least stressful jobs have one thing in common: autonomy. “These jobs tend not to have someone standing over their shoulder putting pressure on them to get things done,” he says. University professors answer to themselves, he points out. “They are basically kings of their own fiefdoms.” The same is true for the other jobs on the least stressful list, including seamstress/tailor, which ranks second. “In these jobs, you’re doing something for which you are highly qualified and you’re the expert in how to get things done,” he adds. That’s the case for medical records and medical laboratory technicians, ranked numbers three and five on the list. Those jobs must be done with precision. The people who do them tend to work on their own, without much supervision. The same goes for jewelers, number four on the list, audiologists, dieticians and hair stylists.

The other thing most of the least stressful jobs have in common: At the end of the day, people in these professions can leave their work behind, and their hours tend to be the traditional nine to five.

None of the salaries for these professions top $100,000 and some are quite low, like seamstress/tailor with a median salary of just $26,000 and hair stylist, at $22,500, according to BLS numbers. But compensation was just one of the things CareerCast measured.

Though hair stylists make the lowest salary on the list, they are among the happiest, says Lee. Their colleagues and clients tend to become friends and they get lots of positive feedback and thanks for their work. “With a lot of these jobs, you’re getting warm fuzzies as you work,” he notes.

***ADDENDUM***

Since writing the above piece I have received more than 150 comments, many of them outraged, from professors who say their jobs are terribly stressful. While I characterize their lives as full of unrestricted time, few deadlines and frequent, extended breaks, the commenters insist that most professors work upwards of 60 hours a week preparing lectures, correcting papers and doing research for required publications in journals and books. Most everyone says they never take the summer off, barely get a single day’s break for Christmas or New Year’s and work almost every night into the wee hours.

Many of the comments are detailed, with time breakdowns laying out exactly how many hours the writers spend doing their jobs. One commenter, Jonathan Reynolds, sent me an itemized list of tasks he’d performed since Dec. 19 which included writing a 12,600-word book chapter and a 1,000-word book review, peer reviewing a manuscript for an editor, reviewing manuscripts for a professional journal and one for Oxford University Press. He also worked on an annotated bibliography and helped a struggling student. I agree that doesn’t sound like a relaxing schedule.

A commenter named Gwen Schug sent along a link to a well-written piece responding to the study I cited, detailing the hours it takes to do every aspect of a professor’s job, including the three hours preparation required per lecture, the fact that most professors have up to 55 advisees, each of whom requires at least an hour per semester, and grading, which can take a half hour per assignment. The piece also says professors are expected to attend 2-4 conferences a year, and points out that universities rarely pay the full expense.

I appreciate all of the comments and encourage you to read them. My intention here was to relay an intriguing list put together by a career and job listing site, CareerCast, that surveyed data on 200 jobs and drew up a list of professions it deemed least stressful, according to metrics I describe above, which are weighted toward categories like physical demands, environmental conditions and risking one’s life. CareerCast didn’t measure things like hours worked and the stresses that come from trying to get papers published in a competitive environment or writing grants to fund research.

I think there is value in CareerCast’s list, but I also welcome the observation that my characterization of a professor’s duties failed to include the stress brought on by long hours and the pressure to publish scholarly work. Though I happen to know a tenured professor who enjoys several breaks during the year and takes a several-week vacation over the summer, I didn’t set out to report exhaustively on the hours professors work. Unquestionably, the number varies greatly and is often high.

All of that said, to me the most striking thing about the comments I received is the fact that so many professors write that while they find their jobs stressful, they are deeply satisfied and happy in their work. This comment from David Perry is typical: “I love my job. It's definitely deeply rewarding. But the stresses are intense and the workload never ending.”